SOVIET HISTORY LESSONS

Copies: to the Union of Soviet Writers, to the editorial office of Novy Mir magazine, to the editorial office of Literaturnaya Gazeta.

 

[...]

 

Lydia Chukovskaya, in her letter concerning Sholokhov's speech at the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, wrote:

 

"Literature cannot be judged by a criminal court. Ideas should be opposed by ideas, not by prisons and camps. This is what you should have told your audience if you, in fact, rose to that podium as a representative of Soviet literature.

 

"But you spoke as someone who had betrayed it. Your shameful speech will not be forgotten by history.

 

"And literature itself will avenge itself on you, as it takes revenge on everyone who deviates from the difficult duty it imposes. She will sentence you to the death penalty reserved for artists — to creative sterility. And no amount of honors, money, domestic and international awards will negate this sentence.

 

"Literature will avenge itself. For he who had sold his soul to the devil cannot serve the gods. And literature requires from a writer divine revelation, sincerity, and truth. And no matter how brave the pose is which Sholokhov assumes, no matter how sophisticated he is in his repeated attempts to simulate revelation, he will not be able to escape himself. In this sense, revenge is inevitable."

 

Speaking at the Congress, M. Sholokhov spoke about the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel as follows:

 

"Some, hiding behind words about humanism, complain about the severity of their sentence. Here I see delegates from the party organizations of my native Soviet Army. What would they do if traitors appeared in any of their units?! They, our soldiers, are well aware of the fact that humanism by no means signifies spinelessness. (Prolonged applause).

 

"And I also think about one other thing. Had these young fellows with their dirty conscience been caught in the memorable twenties, when judges judged without reliance on strictly delimited articles of the Criminal Code, but were "guided by revolutionary legal consciousness" (applause), oh, these werewolves would have received a different kind of punishment! (Applause). While here, you see, they still talk about the "severity" of this sentence."

 

And all this — pay attention, reader, —- with exclamation marks and continuous applause. What glorious fun.

 

I hope that along with Sholokhov's shameful speech, history will not forget this shameful applause. I really do hope so.

 

It may very well be that the laws of military tribunals are tough, and let us assume that "our soldiers" know no more about humanism than the assertion that "humanism by no means signifies spinelessness." So be it. But what did the orator mean by this? Perhaps M. Sholokhov cannot conceive of the Soviet state except in a form of a military barrack. And Sinyavsky and Daniel, in turn, he would like to present as traitors who suddenly appeared in one of the divisions of this barrack-state, namely, in the Union of Soviet Writers. Then everything is clear. In that case, "our soldiers," who know about humanism only that "humanism by no means signifies spinelessness," can quite conceivably act accordingly, guided not by the norms of some kind of code, suitable only in a democratic state, but by the norms of military legislation, which have been written specifically for barracks.

 

But the "memorable twenties" were a different kind of glorious story! Back then, one would issue an order to shoot them, "guided by the revolutionary sense of justice," end of conversation! While here it was not a military tribunal that held the trial, but an ordinary civil court. And, mind you, they did not even get shot (as would have been the case in the memorable twenties and even more memorable thirties), but received only seven and five years of imprisonment for showing creative independence in literary work and for an attempt to publish their works abroad, because in today's Russia freedom of creativity and freedom of the press are guaranteed only in words, but in reality what is guaranteed is mockery of any freedom by the bureaucrats and the police.

 

[…]

 

The fact that Sholokhov thinks of Russia as a single universal canton, where people belong to the military department from birth on the basis of the serfdom law, and the fact that, in Sholokhov's view, the Union of Soviet Writers is one of the subdivisions of this canton, can still be understood somehow. However, the accusations of treason which Sholokhov puts forward in regard to Sinyavsky and Daniel, appear completely incomprehensible. After all, Sinyavsky and Daniel have never subscribed to Sholokhov's cantons and never took an oath of allegiance to the laws of a military barrack. They never swore allegiance to the military police machine, which to this day is engaged in stifling freedom in Russia.

 

But Sholokhov is not interested in the truth. He just needs to accuse Sinyavsky and Daniel of betrayal. Why? Probably because the Prosecutor did not have enough moral authority to do this. And now, throwing the whole mass of his authority on the scales, the Nobel laureate makes his shameful prosecutor's speech.

 

First, he modestly declares himself "a particle of a great and noble nation," then "the son of a mighty and beautiful Motherland." Then the particle becomes activated: it attacks first the "disgusting monsters" and, having assumed a pose of nobleness which had been shaken to the depths of its soul, he exclaims with bombast:

 

"I am not ashamed of those who have defamed the Motherland and threw mud at things that we hold most holy. They are immoral."

 

Then he goes on from bad to worse. The "Particle" starts to shame all the advanced intelligentsia, which is trying to "protect them." The "Particle" doubly shames "liberal writers who have offered" their services and have requested "to release on parole under their personal guarantees the convicted renegades."

 

You see, "at too high a price have we acquired the things that we have conquered; the Soviet governance is too dear to us for us to allow slander and denigration of it with impunity." Yes, precisely! Millions of people tortured and killed in Stalin's extermination camps are too high a price for Sholokhov's barracks, in which one is allowed only to move one's toes about in one's boots, because the sergeant-major will not notice this. About which, by the way, Sinyavsky and Daniel have written.

 

According to Sholokhov, Sinyavsky and Daniel are slanderers who have defamed the Motherland and threw mud at everything that was sacred to us. But here is what one of the Russian writers writes in his "Letter to an Old Friend":

 

"Think, old comrade! In the courage of Sinyavsky and Daniel, in their nobility, in their victory there is a drop of our blood, our suffering, our struggle against humiliation, against lies, against murderers and traitors of all stripes.

 

"For what is libel? Both you and I -- we both know Stalin's time -- extermination camps on an unprecedented super-Hitler scale, Auschwitz without ovens, where millions of people perished. We know the corruption, the bloody corruption of the government, which, having sworn to do it, still does not want to tell the truth, even about the Kirov case. How long will this last? Could in our truthful past there have been a demarkation line after which slander had begun? I argue that there is no such line, I argue that in regard to Stalin's time the concept of slander cannot be applied. The human brain is unable to imagine the crimes that were committed...

 

"... A short story by Arzhak-Daniel titled "Moscow Speaks", with its exceptionally successful Gogol-like plot about "the day of public murders," can hardly be put in a purely realistic sense next to the transcripts of the XXII Party Congress, with what had been told there. That was no longer a "day of public murders", but "twenty years of public murders."

 

Powerfully said, isn't it? But to this one must add that the concept of slander cannot be applied also to a political regime in which basic democratic and personal freedoms are completely suppressed.

 

Having shamelessly slandered courageous and noble people, having shamed all the brave and honest people who stood up for justice, Sholokhov did not calm down. Feeling, probably, his insignificance in a hopeless struggle with the truth, he turned to delegates from "the party organizations of the near and dear Soviet Army" for help, declaring that reprisals against traitors according to the laws of military tribunals is a model worthy of emulation, applicable to the case of the writers. But even this turned out not to be enough, and this :particle of the great and noble nation" exclaims: "Oh, these werewolves would have received a different kind of punishment," "these goons with a dirty conscience," had they been tried not by a court, but, say, by a revolutionary committee, "guided by the revolutionary sense of justice."

 

Here is a fine example of a truly pathological thinking. Socially dangerous as well, I would say.

 

So, a military tribunal did not sit in judgement.

 

A Revolutionary Committee, "guided by the revolutionary sense of justice," did not shoot them. "And here, you see, they are still talking about the severity of the sentence."

 

They are still arguing, for crying out loud! They dare to intellectualize! Well, isn't this obscurantism, reader?

 

[…]

 

Your shameful speech at the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union will not be forgotten by history. This is for certain. But your prosecutor-like speech will not be ignored by your contemporaries either. If you were simply talking nonsense, one could only regret it. However, your speech cannot be ignored by contemporaries because in it you, as it were, sanctioned the reprisals against two writers who are the spokesmen for the currently rapidly developing trend in Russia toward creative freedom and the revival of national culture.

 

The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel had shown that the Russian cultural intelligentsia is divided into two camps and that the absolute majority of the intelligentsia belongs to the camp of supporters of creative freedom. If it were not for the pressure of the state violence, then the one end of the scales would have been outweighed instantly, and Sinyavsky and Daniel would have simply been carried out of the courtroom in their arms.

 

These events have shown that no defamatory articles in the official press (which is, by the way, completely dependent on the "money bag") could discredit the accused. Letters in defense of Sinyavsky and Daniel continuously arrived at the official organizations and editorial offices of newspapers. Every honest writer and scientist considered it a duty to speak out in defense of the accused. Events have culminated in an open student demonstration in Pushkin Square on December 5. Do you know what all this means? This means, first of all, that people like you do not have any social ground under their feet, except for the machinery of violence. This also means that the ground is floating away from under the feet of the machinery of violence. This means, also, that neither you nor the machinery of violence will have anything to stand on as soon as freedoms are restored in Russia. This means that the machinery of violence will be deprived of power and of its "money bag," and you will be deprived of money, honors, and medals -- domestic, as well as international. This is what it all means. This is the sense in which your shameful speech will not remain without the attention of contemporaries and will not be forgotten by history.

 

While in the social sphere the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel has contributed to the polarization of forces, as a result of which values ​​have remained at one pole, and their almost absolute absence -- at the other, then in the literary sphere this trial has created a point of focus. This trial -- akin to a dead knot -- has tied together at one point the tensioned threads of all the contradictions of our literary life. And let no one think that the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel will be forgotten after some period of discussion. This knot will have to be either untied or cut. This will have to be done, because this will either ensure freedom of creativity in Russia, or Russia will find a way to obtain this freedom of creativity for itself. This will happen because without freedom in general and without freedom of creativity in particular, further successful development of Russia is impossible. It will have to be done or it will be done on its own, no matter what obstacles they put in place, from time to time throwing their temper tantrums -- those, whose soil is slipping from under their feet. This Gordian knot will have to be untied or there will be an Alexander the Great to cut it.

 

You have said in your speech at the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that you had been "doubly ashamed of those who offer their services and have requested to release on parole under their personal guarantees the convicted renegades."

 

I feel ashamed too. Let the request for release under personal guarantees be just a tactical step by some of the liberal writers. Let it be so. But how could they ask to release under personal guarantees the people whose honesty and nobleness are not subject to any doubt, whose work should do Russian literature proud. Asking to release Sinyavsky and Daniel under personal guarantees is akin to trying to bail out justice and talent. This shows such poverty of spirit, such cowardice and such plebeian timidity, conceivable only in a country in which human dignity has been almost completely extinguished. This is where one's hair indeed stands on end with shame! In any other country where elementary democratic freedoms are ensured in practice, and not in empty words, people would simply demand the release of the accused and protest against the arbitrariness of the authorities. If this had happened in a democratic country, a certain number of writers would simply leave the Union of Soviet Writers in protest, and form another Union, say, the Union of Russian Writers. But here, you see, they write compassionate letters and ask the rapists to release freedom and justice under personal guarantees, as one would do with some fraudsters.

 

At this point this is yet a protest of slaves, but still a protest. They are still slaves, but a movement is underway to defend freedom and justice.

 

True, the members of the Union of Soviet Writers are far from an indicator of the real capabilities of the Russian creative intelligentsia. The Union, in its essence, is simply the Sholokhov-style unit-barrack, through which the "money bag" buys and kills talent right at the root. In this way, in a matter of just a few decades, it had managed to kill off Russian literature completely. Only in just a handful cases of just a few unbending individuals was it forced to either bring them to bay or physically destroy them in the twenties, the thirties and the fifties.

 

Everyone understands what it means to physically destroy a writer, but not everyone understands how the process of killing literature had proceeded in Russia. Russia in this respect has turned out to be a rather original country. This originality goes as follows. On the one hand, a writer is hypnotized by the unanimous fascination with the communist ideals, and on the other, he absolutely cannot accept the disgusting communist reality with Stalin's concentration camps and its general absurdity. Communist concentration camps prevent him from singing praises to the communist ideals, and communist ideals get in the way of criticizing communist concentration camps. Either a state of creative paralysis ensues, or the writer begins to cheat; in both cases he perishes as a writer. So it's very simple. And if, for example, M. Sholokhov would take a small excursion into his own past, then he would have to admit that he himself was unable to escape this creative paralysis, which probably explains how long it took for him to write of the second part of his Virgin Soil Upturned with all of its fraudulent shortcomings.

 

Unfortunately, there are people in the West who are inclined to think, like the respected Secretary of the European Community of Writers, Vigorelli, for example, that the underground literature in the USSR, even if it exists in the form of random manuscripts, leaflets, etc., does not matter, and that what really matters are the works that are published, "literature acting in the light of day, with its victories and its defeats."

 

Vigorelli must know and understand the subject he is talking about. The Union of Soviet Writers and the official publications of works in modern Russia destroy writers and literature, spoil tastes, and make readers stupid.

 

Literature is, after all, a peculiar and, incidentally, the most accessible and most effective way of getting to know the world, a way of educating one's feelings and shaping one's psychology. Fortunately for Russia, the modern-day Russians hardly read contemporary Russian political literature and fiction, or, if they do, they do so with great caution. Otherwise, the stupidity and dullness of the senses would be universal. In Russia people mainly read the classics -- Russian and foreign -- as well as translated contemporary foreign literature, and only from the beginning of the sixties have we begun to read Pasternak, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Platonov, etc. en masse, but not thanks to the official publications of the Union of Soviet Writers, but despite of them -- via an almost illegal route, almost under fear of administrative and moral condemnation, and often even under pain of direct judicial reprisals. Indeed, until now, most of the works of these writers have not been officially published.

 

If you want to know, in Russia in the sixties, typewritten reprints of the best examples of modern Russian literature have reached, probably, unprecedented proportions. It is precisely underground literature, that is, literature not officially published -- starting from unpublished writers of the twenties and ending with the works of A. Sinyavsky and Y. Daniel -- which is of primary and only significance for our national culture. And, conversely, all Soviet literature that is being published (except the occasional publications of some isolated works) has no positive significance for the awakening of national self-awareness and national culture.

 

And if anyone in the West thinks that the works of writers such as Yevtushenko and others like him have at least some influence on the development of modern Russian literature, then such person is deeply mistaken. All this is insignificant and carries such dubious values ​​that it is quite permissible to pose the following question: are any values contained t​​here at all? And can we hope for them to appear at least in the future? I personally think that real literary values ​​will emerge bypassing organizations such as the Union of Soviet Writers and official publications, at the time when freedom of creativity, freedom of the press, and freedom organization are restored.

 

The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel once again convincingly proves this. But anyone who thinks the same way as Vigorelli needs to be explained that until freedom of creativity, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press in Russia are guaranteed, literature cannot develop only through bypassing the soul-destroying chambers such as the Union of Soviet Writers and the official publications, i.e. clandestinely, because it has no other possibilities. And "in the light of day" in today's Russia, only fraudulent literature can develop, ranging from the primitivism of Mikhalkov (who, by the way, had declared: "It's good that we have state security forces which can protect us from people like Sinyavsky and Daniel") and ending with more sophisticated, fashionable pseudo-writers and pseudo-poets, who finally got an opportunity to speak half-truths and thus more subtly simulate the truth. Such literature, which, led by Mikhalkov, asks the KGB to "protect it" from all manifestations of creative freedom, even if it does have meaning, that meaning can only be negative.

 

But if S. Mikhalkov, in the face of the pressure from the returning sense of national identity, needs to hide behind the backs of the KGB, then S. V. Smirnov, for example, must have his dictatorship. And so he, with graphomaniac awkwardness, hastily comes up with a few lines:

 

I can definitely say

that it becomes more visible,

that what we call "a fifth column"

continues to be topical...

 

And when these people kick up stink

and call the enemy army for help,

our dear dictatorship,

do not weaken, do not die!

 

For forcible assertion of its ideological viability, fascism has an indispensable need for a fascist dictatorship. The ideology of Marxism (let it be known to you, Mr. S. V. Smirnov) has shown its viability even in countries with an anti-communist regime, for example, in the Italian, French or Japanese democracies, where it enjoys wide popularity. But, according to Smirnov, for Marxist ideology to triumph, you see, a dictatorial bludgeon is absolutely necessary in a country where this ideology is official and is, in fact, the only one. How strange all this is, isn't it?

 

The logic of this contradiction leads us to the conclusion that S. V. Smirnov needs a dictatorship not to defend Marxist ideology, but to protect the interests of people who exploit the values ​​of this ideology, who vulgarize and discredit it, by means of a dictatorship, the people to whom he himself belongs. In such a case, of course, one can't manage without a dictatorship, because under such circumstances you either win or you lose. This is just fear for one's own skin. This is the screeching noise of a literary prostitute, terrified to death by the threat of a closure of a brothel. This is the stomachic fear of a well-fed hog, whose grunts no one needs to hear anymore. This, when all is said and done, is the fear of a respectable literary whore before the onset of an overall triumph of morality.

 

[…]

 

Today's literary Russia resembles a sleeping beauty who has just woken up from an ideological hypnosis and has not even had time to rub her eyes properly, while the Secretary of the European Community of Writers declares: do not pay any attention to it, what matters are literary swindlers and speculators with their Pyrrhic victories... But life itself has refuted Vigorelli. The underground work of Sinyavsky and Daniel forced him come to Moscow and defend this very underground work.

 

Yes, our right hand is still in shackles, and the shackle wounds have not yet healed on the left hand! The work of Sinyavsky and Daniel is for now still the work of this one left hand. And Russia will yet have an opportunity to read with amazement real works of literature, including the future works of Sinyavsky and Daniel, if their talent survives in the camps.

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[...]

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Translated from English by Alissa Ordabai.